Money, business, Money this has little merit with how good a game is, Lineage 2 has survived and been able to stay alive by being funded by small % of the playerbase who put in 50000 dollars each or more into the game to get p2w advantages. Also the profits Lineage 1 brings in ties in with development for L2, does this mean then that Lineage 2 is a good game still worthy of time investment? hell no
You've made this quite ideological, which is hard to provide any counter argument to because ideals are personal.
Try doing this professionally and then maybe your views would change. I am talking from a position of professional experience with games that turned over more than 300k euros a month.
For good or bad the world revolves around money, businesses that don't profit don't continue, it is that simple. I'm pretty sure if Jamie's costs started outweighing the donations he would also reconsider.
Mir 2 existed broke into the west and stayed there for a respectable amount of time and made a respectable amount of money but more importantly made a fanbase and a legacy. An mmo'er will dismiss Mir 3 from any serious discussion as it barely did anything that could be considered a breakthrough improvement to Mir 2. It has a some kind of a playerbase in the worlds gaming capital Korea but that place is pure gaming addiction you could throw the Nokia Snake game into that place, update it with basic online features for interaction and comepetition and it would probably survive.
Again, this is something personal to you, it is opinion not fact and there are no arguments to counter strong beliefs. It's like arguing gun control.
At the end of the day QGO had 15-20 people in full time employment for a couple of years, they made money, they had success. Given the timeframe of when they were doing this it was an achievement. Online gaming was an incredibly niche community back then. Yes it eventually failed, there was too much competition and the smaller games didn't make the F2P with micro transactions transition quickly enough.
Many games since big and small have been a lot less successful.
During that time period, when I was running Cabal Online if we hadn't have made the transition to F2P with an item shop we would have died too.
As for the Korean gaming market, you are quite wrong. They produce thousands of games a year, many die before even being released. It is an incredibly cut throat market. Attend G*Star in Seoul (as I have done) and you will see for yourself.
Sorry about this but WoW is a trigger for me feel free to ignore
"The golden/national treasure of the west", WoW is a single player campaign where you delve into dungeons with incredibly lifelike AI team mates to battle foes, read into lore after lore and pick up items after items as you wonder "how am i so addicted to this progession!?". "Don't worry about joining WoW regardless of ur skill level or personality, we insure a pleasant multiplayer online experience where you'll interact with no one because, as we all know everyone is toxic". Play a few games of LoL and then you'll experience a multiplayer game, where you geinunely interact with people postively and negatively, it's refreshingly human but my point is, is that wow is far from an mmo as it has so many instancing you can't engage with any players, no pvp/seiging/proper clanning and the only competition they could come up with is how fast or can you clear a dungeon difficulty of 110 or something?
It's just the shame of the west, making billions off of anti-social man children.
This is something I have no idea how to respond to, its so incredibly personal to your beliefs that anything I said no matter how rational or reasoned wouldn't have any bearing.
With that said, gamers the world over are all benefiting from something that wow did, it made online gaming socially acceptable, it kicked a lot of the nerd stereotypes of online gaming off the table. You got big name celebrities discussing how they played wow, you had TV adverts. It had a huge positive impact on the entire industry.
Moved with the times massively? few examples would be great because you've lost me, imo the fundamentals or Mir 2 have not changed. Btw I'm not a fan of you practically saying that the west is unwilling to appreciate anything different and that any change WeMade make is genius and well thought out.
You are choosing to read into what I've said in your own interpretation. I specifically called out this community, which isn't unfounded.
The fundamentals of either game haven't changed massively, they both work to their appeal and that is why they are both successful. They have adapted and adjusted to the times though.
Change from subscription based to micro transaction is one example.
Lowering grind requirements, making it easier for new players to get involved is another.
Introducing new features (can't speak for Mir 2, but Mir 3 has had significant development work) some of those from M3 are:
- Rebalancing the whole game
- Introducing catch up mechanics
- A third wall that isn't won via PvP
- A daily private hunting area for groups or guilds (think diablo rift style, you create it and join as a group, mobs spawn once and only once, when you leave its gone)
- Redoing weapon refines entirely
- Adding gem/socket systems
- Adding secondary stat systems
- Contribution Points system for mentoring
- Reforging systems
- A personal favourite, Fishing
- A secondary skills/spells system based on scaling monsters
- Events and holiday celebrations
- 1v1 arena system with rankings and rewards
- A daily PvP battle system, its like there is a convoy of goods being transported from one city to another, you can join the defending or attacking team, if there is an imbalance in numbers it adds NPCs to the battle, there are rewards for either capturing or defending.
- Mini Games (a lot more than what we ever saw on Euro), theres one that's like some wishing well that gives a random daily buff and another that looks interesting that translates roughly to the room of 25 trials.
- Gongji Temple - Seems like a 6v6 battleground or something similar, never been able to get much solid info
- Crafting System (was briefly in Euro maybe, was something I tested on GSP)
- Premium Dungeons (not sure on this, never been)
- A map where depending on if its day or night mobs get buffed with a number of random affixes, quests linked to killing these
Mir Chronicles i'm sure a lot would say was a success, it lasted for years and even tho everyone wants to be with Jamie including me because Jamie constructs a server EXACTLY like we want BUT at least MC can say they lasted for longer than this mad scientist.
I only had a very brief experience with Chronicles at the very start, so I can't really say much.
You do seem to have a more personal issue with Jamie/the server, you come across incredibly negative with little to no constructive reasoning. While I don't agree with everything, I can see that he is trying and it isn't an easy job pleasing an angry mob.
Ok well probably the original was a lot more fun and balanced and keep with it's original pace I'm sure it was a decent experience, in ur opinion what did Zircon do wrong in comparison?
The areas that I've already discussed are mostly publically available here.
Biggest things are balance and scaling. Some things too low, some things too high, but it is being worked on and I'm positive that if we all come together we can work towards a great server.
Other things are fairly minor in comparison, the overall risk/reward of the game doesn't exist here, no chance to break anything, no chance to lose anything. It has wider reaching consequences for economy and longevity as well as character progression. Again I think it is something that can be resolved.
The current levels are a minor concern, but nothing that can't be fixed, if we look at this for the long run of being level 100+ then 0-70 isn't really an issue and can be worked to be more balanced. If we look further ahead with a lot more Korean content on the horizon and say look to level 120+ then all of what has been done to now could be considered meaningless in the long run and work out the balance for the future.
SW just doesn't feel Mir 3 at all, as a long time wall holder from Euro I would say the original system worked pretty well. It wasn't easy to defend at all, it relied heavily on timings and alliances. If DA didn't have Apex we would have lost SW, likewise if they didn't have DA they would have lost DMW. Towards the end when the other guilds started working together and people had caught up (DA and Apex had an early lead in bosses and items, mainly because a lot of us had played the Korean beta and knew what we were doing), the wars were incredibly close. The ballista and catapults, doors etc actually made for fun battles and drained guild funds really heavily.
